Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday May 13, 2014 @05:36PM
from the my-money's-on-al-gore dept.

aarondubrow writes: "The Internet has evolved to support an incredibly diverse set of needs, but we may be reaching a point at which new solutions and new infrastructure are needed in particular to improve security, connect with the Internet of Things and address an increasingly mobile computing landscape. Yesterday, NSF announced $15 million in awards to develop, deploy and test future Internet architecture in challenging real-world environments. These clean-slate designs explore novel network architectures and networking concepts and also consider the larger societal, economic and legal issues that arise from the interplay between the Internet and society.

Each project will partner with cities, non-profit organizations, academic institutions and industrial partners across the nation to test their Internet architectures. Some of the test environments include: a vehicular network deployment in Pittsburgh, a context-aware weather emergency notification system for Dallas/Fort Worth, and a partnership with Open mHealth, a patient-centric health ecosystem based in San Francisco."

How about starting with TCP & UDP? They were somehow designed on the assumption that all participating machines are well behaved good citizens. In practice this ain't happening (see SYN flood for example, there are "mitigation" measure but none is a definitive "fix"). These need to be replaced with something that would be resistant to mischief by design.

That sounds great in theory, but at this point I'm kind of reserved to the fact that "resistant to mischief" just means we would have a year or two of peace before the inevitable flaws were so totally exploited that we were right back where we started.

The internet has nothing wrong with it that we couldn't fix with a combination of net neutrality and convincing American ISPs to get off their asses and bring us up to speed with the rest of the third world.

Net neutrality and speed increases would not solve the intrinsic problems with DNS architecture, NAT proxies breaking things, gigantic non-aggregate BGP tables, limited IPv4 address space, limitations of TCP protocol, ICMP mismanagement, lack of standards to address continuous disruption in mobile environments, and a whole mess of other problems that are currently addressed by patchwork solutions, or simply no solutions.

As for this BS marketroid term "Internet of Things"... Please people, just... Don't let them win. The internet has always had "things" on it. Whether that "thing" means your PC or your phone or your microwave. The idea of having every device in your house online should terrify you, not delight you, so fuck upgrades that make it easier for your fridge to tell the NSA that you eat the same things as Joe Terrorist.

At one time, people said the same thing about PC connectivity to the internet. Who are you that you need to connect to the global internet. The internet is for mainframes and important computers; why would you want anyone else to be able to connect to your computer, and why should we allow you to connect to everyone elses?

Paranoia notwithstanding, it should be up to individuals to decide what they connect and how they connect and what capabilities they decide to leverage. But if you think its bad for your fridge to be connected to the internet, I have no idea why you would allow your computer to be connected to it either. That's infinitely more dangerous.

How about we just make use of the technologies we have already, namely mesh networks and IPv6, to make backbone providers irrelevant aside as links between countries? Oh wait, the entrenched powers writing the laws won't have any of that shit.